CAMBRIDGE, England -- President Jiang Zemin of China, who is also general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, made a remarkable speech last week to a handpicked audience of party faithful. The audience had been called to the Great Hall of the People to celebrate the 80th birthday party of the CCP. In the two-hour speech, full of the usual praise for the party's achievements, Jiang called on the party to welcome representatives of China's emerging private sector into its ranks. What made this remarkable was that the Chinese character for "communist" means "no private sector," more or less.
The CCP has good reason to want to have the private sector among its supporters. The party is increasingly dependent on the sector to deliver the growth in income and employment that it believes it has to deliver if it is to stay in power.
The Chinese people, it is said, do not care who is in power as long as their bellies are full. The state-owned enterprise sector is not only failing to produce the dynamism needed to play the vanguard role in the economy, worse than that it has been laying off millions of workers each year. Farmers, too, are leaving the land as natural and man-made disasters reduce their income below subsistence level. Indeed, the new five-year plan calls for more workers to be made redundant in public-sector industries and for tens of millions of farmers to be taken off the land and found employment in urban areas. That spells trouble if jobs are not there: Last year, the government reported that there were 120,000 incidents of violent crime around China, mostly by disaffected unemployed.